With creativity and desire hijacked so effectively by work, spectacle and cyberspace what, asks Franco ‘Bifo' Berardi – across three books published in English this year – has become of autonomy today?

What lies beyond the failed utopias of the modernist welfare state and the free market? Gail Pickering's recent film/performance, despite its strictly internal focus on life inside a Brutalist housing estate, opens up scope for speculation. Review by Kate Rich

Variant magazine have produced a press release addressing the response of James Doherty, Media Manager of Culture and Sport Glasgow and President of the National Union of Journalists, to a text published in Variant by Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt. 'The main thrust of the article is to expose the connections between the various board members of CSG and its trading arm and their multifarious business interests and strategies for culture, which point to the privatisation of a valuable public service and the erosion of the common good.'

Variant, one of the few magazines covering the grim process of stealth privatisation of Glasgow's cultural assets, appears to have been specifically targeted by one of the very privateers it criticised, and who has banned its distribution at Tramway gallery, in a highly defensive abuse of power:

Is a rabble run media becoming a possibility? And are artists in the vanguard or blocking the way? The AV media arts festival in the North-East of England last month suggested the ambivalence of artistic interventions into state and corporate broadcasting. Report by Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater

There is nothing I like better than sticking it to the ‘Man’. On some days I don’t mind what ‘Man’ that is, in fact some times I just want to stick it to all men and some women too, especially the smooth-skinned trollope who serves me anti aging cream in the pharmacy, with a glittering and sickening smile. But how many of us are really unsatisfied with our lives? How many of us can really pluck up the courage to change the status quo?

Twenty Five Years from Scratch, ed. Michael Parsons, London: London Musician's Collective, 1994.